Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“You’ll wait a long time if you expect a salute from the army,” Sula said. “May I ask where you’ve spent the war?”

“Kaidabal,” Lady Trani said, naming a city south of Zanshaa. “We ran there after we heard that everyone was being arrested. We stayed with a client of ours, a wealthy businessman.”

“And what did you do there?”

“Hid. We had no other options, because we had to abandon all our equipment in Zanshaa.” Lady Trani sighed. “There were such problems. We couldn’t get ration cards, you see.”

“I see.” Sula looked Trani up and down and saw little evidence of starvation. Her fur was glossy and her bottom was no less plump than that of most Torminel.

“Lady Trani,” Sula said, “may we speak privately?”

“Of course.”

Sula took Trani’s arm and led her to the room where important visitors had once been asked to wait while their escorts were found. The place still had its thick carpeting and expensive paneling, but the original furniture was gone, and had been replaced by some cheap sofas on which the guard took their breaks.

“My lady,” Sula said, “please believe I have your best interests at heart. I ask that you not make yourself ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” Again that surprised look. “Whatever do you mean, Lady Sula?”

“You can’t expect my army to respect a commander who spent the war hiding in Kaidabal when they were fighting and dying here in Zanshaa. And the government-I proclaimed myself Governor on the day of the victory and no one has disputed it.”

“But I’m the senior officer,” Lady Trani said, her lisping voice quite mild. “One doesn’t salute the person; one salutes the rank-and obeys it too. You keep referring to ‘my’ army, but it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the empire, and I am the senior imperial officer present. I don’t dispute that you’re the military governor, just as I don’t expect you to dispute the fact that I’m about to succeed you.”

“They’ll laugh at you,” Sula said. Her own laughter had faded, to be replaced by a growing foreboding.

“As long as they laugh in private,” Trani said, her voice level. “If they laugh in public, or disobey, I shall be forced to cut their throats.”

Sula refrained from taking a step back, and reminded herself that Lady Trani was unarmed.

“I think,” she said, “that we should refer this matter to higher authority.”

The delay was mainly to allow herself time to think. Lady Trani no longer seemed a figure of fun. She was going to be a serious problem, and worse for the fact that Fleet law, custom, and the Praxis were all behind her.

Furthermore, the only person to whom Sula could appeal was Tork. He was exactly the sort of person who would find Lady Trani’s simplicities appealing; and in any case, Sula very much doubted that Tork, on the heels of receiving her last message, would feel much in sympathy with her.

“While I don’t dispute that Lady Trani outranks me,” Sula said in her message to Tork, “I am nevertheless concerned whether someone who spent the war in hiding, after abandoning her equipment, is going to receive the respect of the army and other institutions here in the High City. I don’t want to push myself forward, but if the disparity in rank is truly a problem, you could solve the problem by promoting me. I’m already doing the work, after all.”

As Sula expected, Tork’s reply, received some fifteen hours later, ignored this suggestion.

“It has long concerned me that a lieutenant of such youth and of only a few months’ seniority held such a critical post,” he said in a message addressed to Lady Trani Creel. “It is meant as no offense to Lady Sula to say that she has suffered from her inexperience. Lady Trani, I am pleased to confirm you as Military Governor of Zanshaa. I hope you will rule with firmness, and consider it your first duty to kill the traitors who have caused our people so much suffering.”

Lady Trani turned from the screen to where Sula sat, in the office of the Home Fleet commander with its huge curved glass window.

“I believe I’ll take that salute now, Lady Sula,” Trani said.

“Yes, my lady.” With grave deliberation Sula rose from her desk and braced.

“Thank you very much,” Trani said. She ambled across the office to join Sula behind her desk. She looked through the great curved window at the morning light shining over the Lower Town, the kingdom she had just conquered without firing so much as a shot.

“I’ll need your access codes,” she said. “I trust you will remain on hand for the duration of the transition, after which I will find you a posting suitable to your station. And of course I’ll recommend you for a nice decoration for all you’ve done here.”

Sula tried not to show the savage amusement she felt. No doubt Trani was trying to be kind.

“Thank you, my lady,” she said.

She’d had nearly fifteen hours to make herself ready for this moment.

Lady Trani looked down at the desk. “I’ll also need to meet with your council, or cabinet, or whatever they’re called.”

“I don’t believe they have a name,” Sula said. “But I’ll call them.”

“No,” Lady Trani said firmly. “I’llcall them. If you’ll provide me with contact information.”

“Very well.”

Sula had to admire Lady Trani’s composure. She knew so very clearly what she wanted, what was proper, and what was her due.

Whether anyone else could be brought to agree with her was another problem.

“I’ve been reviewing the communications between the governor’s office and Supreme Commander Tork,” Lady Trani told the meeting later. “The Supreme Commander has several areas of concern.

“First, the matter of punishments. We simply haven’t been killing enough traitors. It’s my understanding,” she said, turning to Sula, “that we have something like a thousand prisoners?”

“They’re being debriefed,” Sula explained. “Once the interrogators are done with them-”

“Lord Tork said just to kill them,” Trani said. “It seems to me that we could do it all at once, with machine guns.”

“The penalty for treason,” Sula reminded, “is to be thrown from a height.”

“Blast. I forgot.” A shiver of annoyance crossed Trani’s furry face. “Well, can’t we machine-gun them first, then chuck them?”

The governing council gazed at her from their places. They used the room in the Commandery, all subdued lighting and polished wood, that had been used by the Fleet Control Board before the evacuation. Overhead glowed a wormhole map of the empire, Zanshaa a burning red jewel with its eight wormhole gates. The council sat at a U-shaped table, with the new lady governor at its center.

“The High City lacks the necessary open spaces for a mass execution in that style,” Sula said. “Besides, the custom is for the victim to be alive when he’s tipped over the side.”

“Blast,” Trani said. “Well, see that it’s done as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, my lady,” Sula said.

Her reluctance to kill the Naxid prisoners had nothing to do with compassion. They had killed tens of thousands, and she wished them nothing but years of torment. She just didn’t want them to die until their last brain cell had been stripped of any useful content.

Lady Trani paused to light a cigarette, which she placed in a holder that clipped to one of her fangs, allowing her to talk and smoke without using her hands. Sula wondered idly if the cigarette was one that, at some point, she’d had in one of her warehouses.

Trani looked at the others. “Smoke if you please, my lor-I mean, ladies and gentlemen.”

Julien reached in a pocket for a cigarette. Sergius, seated next to him, stared expressionlessly at the lady governor, his thoughts well hidden behind his dead eyes.